In areas such as automobile, electric machinery, and aerospace and defense areas, many domains (departments) such as mechanical, electric, systems design, software and test departments are involved in developing a particular product because products are complex and made up of many parts. While such many departments are involved, pieces of data across the domains need to be associated with each other since they need to collaborate to ultimately produce an integrated product.
FIG. 1 is a diagram illustrating an example of collaboration among different domains at an automobile manufacturer. It can be seen from FIG. 1 that data from different domains, namely systems model, request management, control analysis, CAD, electric/electronic circuit, and parts configuration management, and embedded software domains, are associated with one another.
However, data are associated across domains ad hoc at present, which makes it difficult to ensure centralized traceability and impact analysis of entire products.
One of the causes of the difficulty is that experts in different domains use different tools. To resolve the problem, a standardized tool may be used across the domains. However, it is difficult in reality to standardize tools across the domains because experts in the domains have a strong desire to use their familiar tools and different domains require tools with different functions.
Therefore, there is demand for a technique to enable information within each individual domain to be managed with an existing tool and enable only information relating to various domains to be centrally managed to present a view of an entire product across the domains, thereby facilitating collaboration among experts. FIG. 2 generally illustrates such a demanded view. That is, an association information management function 210 is demanded that provides a view 212 of information associating pieces of information from domains 202, 204, 206 and 208 as illustrated in FIG. 2.
FIG. 3 in particular illustrates association of information from two domains in further detail. A request management domain 302 has data elements A1 through A11 structured in the form of a directed acyclic graph (DAG). A systems model domain 304 has data elements B1 through B6 also structured in the form of a directed acyclic graph.
In this way, data are structured in DAGs in two domains and stored in storage devices of computers of the domains so as to be accessed electronically and individually. An operator, preferably an expert, can operate another computer preferably connected to the computers of the two domains through a network to generate a view of association between data elements of the two domains on that computer. The view is illustrated as a relationship hub 306 in FIG. 3 and in practice is a part of the view 212 of the association information illustrated in FIG. 2.
Such association through operation by an operator can visualize association between domains. However, it is difficult to determine whether or not associations generated by operations by the operator are exhaustive or appropriate because the amounts of data in the domains are huge.
A technique disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2000-90091 aims to allow a user of information represented as a directed ordered tree to give an criterion relating to a structure of the information to extract a substructure that matches the criterion without needing precise knowledge about the structure of the information. When a search criterion that defines a content of a node that makes up the directed ordered tree and a relation between nodes is input, matching means deletes an intermediate node in a directed ordered tree of information 1a to be processed stored in information storage means 1, performs an operation to relocate a node string immediately below the intermediate node to the position where the intermediate node was positioned to generate a homogenized directed ordered tree, and extracts a directed ordered tree in the homogenized directed ordered tree that meets the search criterion. Thus, the technique enables the use of a search criterion that uses relation between nodes in searching across many items of information that have different logical structure.
However, the technique disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2000-90091 does not provide criteria for determining appropriateness of the relation between nodes.